I Genuinely Felt His Pain

It was 08:am, I was sat in my usual chair on the balcony with my morning coffee, the French style doors and all the other windows in the apartment were of course already fully open, to allow the gentle much cooler breeze of the morning to flow through. The external temperature was already 26 degrees(c), it doesn’t drop much below 22 degree(c) throughout the night and early hours but, until the sun pops its head around the corner and starts to raise the mercury once again to beyond the 30+ degree(c) mark, it would remain very pleasant. Although I will not say too much about ‘our’ particular weather, as it is far hotter in many other parts of Spain, and Europe, including some parts of the UK, than it is down in our little corner of the Costa del Sol. Whilst it is also still relatively early in the Season for us, in respect of ‘Wild Fires’, they have already started in other more Northerly areas of Spain and, in many other Countries they have already been devastating with numerous fatalities, so for once, for us, the weather is not the ‘Hot Topic’ it would usually be in these rambles, and yes, the pun was intended 🤭

After a four week delay, on this particular morning we were awaiting the call from Joe, to alert us to the fact that he had arrived at the outer security gate and needed us to let him in. The phone rang almost smack on the dot at 08:30am and I met Joe, and Robert, the first of his team of Spanish Contractor’s, down in the car park. Joe always comes on the first day of the project and he was extremely apologetic for the delay with the original agreed start date of the project, but hey, he was here at last and that was all that mattered. Over the period of the next couple of weeks we would see a whole raft of different faces as the Spanish Contractor’s came and went, starting with Spanish ‘Robert’ as we have come to call him, as it is Robert and not ‘Roberto’, who was ‘The Dismantler’, after him there would be a Plumber, then the Electrician ‘José’, whom we had come to know when he did our kitchen project last year, then as the work progressed there would be a Carpenter (To make and install our new ‘Pocket Door’ and Bathroom Cabinetry), then the Bathroom Fitter and Tiler and maybe perhaps some other faces, but as each Contractor arrived and departed, our en-suite bathroom would start to change from looking like a demolition site, to metamorphosing into the new, beautiful and modern en-suite bathroom of our dreams, okay not quite our dreams, as the space we actually have is not that large, we would need a large Private Villa to realistically fulfil that dream, so perhaps we will leave that rebuild project until next year 😂 Few of the contractor’s can speak any English, but our level of basic Spanish conversation has slightly improved since last year, Shazza’s more so than my own, I wonder why that is 🤔 So, if they did need to ask us anything, or us them, we should have less difficulties. Joe, the owner of the firm, is English, but he does not remain on site, he just visits at various stages throughout the two weeks just to check on his team, he always has multiple projects going on, his firm is very popular in the whole of the Malaga Province and he has an excellent reputation for conducting quality first class projects, to which we can personally testify after completion of our kitchen project last year. Joe had given us an initial ten working day timescale, although he expected to have it completed within seven or eight working days, but we knew from the last project how there has to be a degree of flexibility with these things, in case they meet unanticipated problems, or an employee suddenly takes ill, or just wants an impromptu duvet day 🤭

We knew of course that we would be confined to barracks for the next couple of weeks, not that we had any reason not to trust leaving them alone, but at the end of the day they would be staranger’s to us, in our home and at least by being here, if they had questions or needed something, like an ice-cold drink, we would be on hand to assist. But that would be no hardship as with the timing of this project, with us now being on our ‘Summer schedule’, we don’t generally go out during the heat of the day anyway. We had already done a weekly shop and, if we did happen to need anything else, then one or other of us could just pop out to the shops (Or Fruiteria 🤭). Additionally, if we wanted to keep up with our daily swimming sessions we could just take it in turns to go down to the pool, so at the end of the day it is not going to be any hardship for us.

Once we heard Robert commence his destruction, Shazza disappeared into the sanctuary of her kitchen to commence her culinary alchemy, the differing aroma’s constantly wafting through and awakening my gastric juices, the smell of another freshly baked sour dough bread loaf being taken out of the oven to cool, onions, garlic and chilli being slowly cooked and softened, the base for yet more of her ‘Plant Based’ concoctions or sauces, and god knows what else she was preparing, but I knew with some confidence that, whatever the final culinary delicacies she produced, they would all be absolutely delicious. Shazza has spent a lot of time since we both started this ‘Plant Based’ food journey together, adapting basic ‘Plant Based’ book recipes with an assortment of herbs and spices, to meet our own individual flavoured preferences. As you know by now, I am not completely one-hundred per cent ‘Plant Based’ and Shazza will, with some particular dishes, go the extra mile and add Fish or Chicken to mine, whatever would I do without her, she is a ‘keeper’ for sure 😂

We had spent the previous evening re-locating ourselves into the guest room and bathroom, dismantling items from our existing en-suite, things that we wanted to keep and of course, moving some clothing from wardrobes and drawers, before covering what needed to remain in our main bedroom with dust sheets. This re-location, beforehand and in our minds at least, felt as if it was going to be a major upheaval when in reality, it wasn’t. We were both excited at seeing whether our new bathroom, which in conjunction with Joe, several months earlier, we had designed, would turn out as we had visualised. Although it was only a relatively small space, the whole room was being totally demolished and then being reconstructed from floor to ceiling, taking out a wall to accommodate a new style sliding ‘Pocket Door’ then rebuilding the wall, replacing all the existing wall and floor tiles, removing all the old porcelain bathroom items, Bath, Sink, WC and Bidet, refitting much more modern bathroom fixtures and fittings, including our new ‘Walk-In Shower’ (No bath), the installation of new bathroom cabinetry and the re-location of newer, more modern electrical sockets and light switches, and of course a totally new modern colour scheme, yes this was our second major project since relocating to Spain on a permanent basis just a little over two years ago, both being projects that would turn what was somebody else’s former home into our own. It isn’t until you see programmes on the TV, like ‘A New Life In The Sun’, where you see that no matter what the location, that all the kitchens and bathrooms in the apartments are pretty much basically constructed and furnished in exactly the same way, same colour schemes, same cabinetry, same kitchen and bathroom fixtures and fittings, same decoration etc. etc. Not that there is anything wrong with that, especially if like us, for the initial period of ownership, it is just used as a ‘second home’ for short periods. But our particular ‘Residential Urbanisation’ was built a little over twenty-years ago now and our apartment was well overdue a general internal refresh and update, so even after the bathroom project is complete, there will still be some re-decorating of other rooms, although we already made a start on this when the weather was much cooler, so we have already completed the Kitchen, Guest Bedroom and Bathroom and the Balcony.

As I sat, just generally pondering, as I regularly do, I was looking out, just at the views in general and at the people walking on the pavement below, when I realised that the majority of the people I was seeing had become pretty familiar to me, some walking their dogs, or taking children to school or walking down the hill towards the beach, marina or just the local supermarket, but they were much the same people that I see on a regular daily or weekly basis, people that, although I didn’t know them personally, they didn’t feel like stranger’s either. It got me thinking about how we have just settled into our community here and got to know and recognise our immediate neighbour’s, Stephanie and her 3-4 year old daughter, and ‘newish’ male partner, who live on the ground floor to the right of us, they are Spanish and are relatively new occupant’s on a long term rental basis, only having moved in just after we came to live here permanently. They do not speak any English whatsoever, and yes you are right, why should they 🤷‍♂️ but still they are so friendly, if they are out in their small patio garden area, a benefit they have of living on the ground floor, and if we are stood looking out over our balcony, as I often do, they always speak and, once again, now that our conversational Spanish has improved, we can engage in brief neighbourly chit chats about the weather and the heat, the usual sort of stuff. Directly below us, but not permanent residents, live John and Tracy, an English couple in their 60’s, we see them probably three or four times a year when they come out for a couple of weeks at a time. On the left of us, again on the ground floor, is an Irish couple, perhaps in their late fifties, again they are not permanent residents, but they are more frequent visitor’s than John or Tracey, the advantage of them holding Irish Passports and still being part of the EU. Immediately above us are Miguel (Spanish), and his wife Katya (Italian) who has recently obtained Spanish Citizenship, I know I have probably mentioned them before, they are both probably in their mid-forties, childless and both work full-time and they both speak excellent English. Because they both work, Miguel in the medical profession and a shift worker at the hospital in Gibraltar, Katya in the ‘High End’ Property Sales industry, so we do not see them on a regular daily basis but when we do, they are extremely friendly and always stop and chat, they have a VW Camper-van which they regularly use, so we have something in common to talk about on the occasions when we do see each other, and I have to confess that their are the odd occasions when we have the pangs of wanting to go back to travelling and enjoying, if not permanently living, on the road in a van. Fortunately, they are currently away in their van touring Northern Spain, so they will not be disturbed by the noise from our renovation project, although we had already pre-warned them that it was going to happen. There are of course other neighbour’s too that we have come to know, of all Nationalities, who live elsewhere on our small complex and who we see either when we are down at the pool, or when we are going to, or coming back from, the car in the car park, and even when we are walking along the promenade or sat having a Coffee, they smile and wave at us in acknowledgment. Our cleaner is Spanish and she regularly stops and chats with us as we come and go, and the same goes for our Spanish Gardner, who is also our Pool Maintenance and General Handyman. So it really does just feel so very nice, and I guess comforting in a way, to have that feeling that this really does feel like home where we are experiencing and enjoying a normal every day life, just like living in any house, on any street within a community I suppose, things are not so very much different wherever you just happen to live.

It was easy, before we took the decision to actually come and live here in Spain on a permanent basis, to perhaps just look at all the positive aspects, the good all year climate probably being the biggest positive although, in truth, we had been coming to this same location for the previous eight years, so we were pretty much already quite familiar with the location, the seasonal changes, the people and the every day services and facilities available. But like everything, sometimes you only see things through ‘Rose Tinted Glasses’ and it isn’t until you spend much longer periods of time in a place, or doing something, like full-time living in a plastic box on wheels for example, when you actually experience the reality of it all, and sometimes, along with all the good and exciting stuff, there are occasionally the disadvantages and hardships, for in reality, life is never actually all that perfect.

I have mentioned many times within these rambles, some of the personal frustrations that I have with living here in Spain as a foreign resident, probably more so with the Official Bureaucracy and very occasionally the ‘Manana Manana’ approach, although we have not really encountered too much of the latter and, initially at least, the language barrier which are, in my personal opinion, the main things that do take some getting used to here. Overhearing a conversation very recently, an American man who it seems had literally just purchased a property in a communal environment, as opposed to a detached residence in its own grounds, he was complaining about the bureaucracy, and not just with the ‘official’ kind, although yes, of course he was having a good moan about that too, everybody does, even the Spanish, it’s a national pastime 🤭 and yes, to be honest I could empathise with him and ‘I genuinely felt his pain’ However, what really appears to have irked him, was that he could not understand why he was restricted to making some of the external changes that he wanted to make to his recent purchase, not being able to have a different style, or frame colour, on his windows, or being able to install a sun canopy of a certain size and overhang, or the restriction to the one choice of colour it could be, not being able to attach a Satelite receiver to an outer wall, the list he reeled off began to grow quite extensively as I sat listening to him, I even nearly had to order a second Anti-Covid Vaccine 😂 At one point, I felt like interjecting and telling him to purchase a ‘detached’ residence in the ‘Campo’, where he was more likely not to encounter ‘as many’ such restrictions, but I restrained myself. It wasn’t as if I was overtly being nosey, or rude, by listening in on his conversation, because the whole Cafe could hear it, let’s just say he ‘bellowed’ rather than ‘talked’, but the knowing smiles coming from the surrounding tables told their own, ‘Been There, Experienced That’ stories 🤭 Having watched a lot of ‘Relocation’ programmes and ‘You Tube’ videos over the past few year’s I have come to realise that none of these things apply just to Spain, most countries in Western Europe are exactly the same, building permission certificates for everything and anything, rules on what you can and cannot do, and things that you would think should take only day’s, or week’s, can actually take months and when you moan to the Estate Agent, or Lawyers, or building project manager’s, they all have the same one ‘unspoken’ International Gesture, the raising of their hands to shoulder height 🤷‍♂️

So, now having just entered our third year of Spanish Residency, I am still learning, as I do still have some way to go with my Spanish education, that you should never put a timescale on things, if things happen on time, or faster than anticipated, think yourself privileged, and certainly do not assume that there will be any logic to anything, for their generally isn’t, so the rule of thumb is to just sit back and take full advantage of those Rose Tinted Glasses, although to be honest, mine are more ‘Tinto’ coloured 😂

By way of an example, some of my more regular readers may recall me mentioning in a previous ramble, the frustrations that I am having with the Spanish Tax Agency, although I didn’t go into any detail at that time. Well those frustrations persist and I have recently learnt, through my Spanish Tax Consultant, that whilst they (the Spanish Tax Authority) have been quick to debit my bank account with my 2024 annual tax liability, it will still be a ‘Few’ more weeks before they get around to issuing me with the one-sheet ‘Resident Tax Certificate’ that I require from them, and with no clarity on what the term ‘Few Weeks’ actually equates to in real world time 🤷‍♂️ But there you go, at least there is some consolation in the knowledge that when I do finally receive it, and forward it to the UK Tax Authority, they have already told me that it is probably going to take ‘at least’ six months before they get around to processing it, and more importantly, refunding the two year’s worth of tax payments that they owe to me. So, it isn’t just the wheels of Spanish Bureaucracy that grind slowly and if I really want to put my ‘Positive’ head on, the longer they both take, the more money I will eventually get refunded, provided that I am still alive to spend it of course 🙄 However, on a bright note, at least Joe’s team have now turned up to commence the bathroom project, the sun is still shining, the sea is still a lovely green and blue colour, the swimming pool water temperature is nice and warm, there are no wild fires in our area, the reservoir still has plenty of water in it, the Anti-COVID Vaccine supplies are still in plentiful supply, the beer is still cold, and, after weeks of seeing the bathroom scales move very little, if at all, they have now seen a weight decrease of 0.6Kg in the last week, although that may not be same story next week as this coming weekend see’s yet another large Fiesta in our local town, will we go though 🤔 Well it would be rude not to now wouldn’t it 😂

Until the next ramble…………….

Hasta Luego mi Amigos, La Vida Es Buena